For the wise precedent, thus established, of placing the formation of a new government under the direct sanction of the old one, the people of this country are indebted chiefly to Hamilton. Nothing can be more unfortunate, in any country, than the necessity or the rashness which sweeps away an established constitution, before a substitute has been devised. Whether the interval be occupied by provisional arrangements or left to a more open anarchy, it is an unfit season for the creation of new institutions. At such a time, the crude projects of theorists are boldly intruded among the deliberations of statesmen; despotism lies in wait for the hazards by which liberty is surrounded; the multitude are unrestrained by the curb of authority; and society is exposed to the necessity of accepting whatever is offered, or of submitting to the first usurper who may seize the reins of government, because it has nothing on which to rest as an alternative. True liberty has gained nothing, in any age or country, from revolutions, which have excluded the possibility of seeking or obtaining the assent of existing power to the reforms which the progress of society demands. In the days when the Confederation was tottering to its fall; when its revenues had been long exhausted; and when its Congress embraced, in actual attendance, less than thirty delegates from only eleven of the States, it would have been the easy part of a demagogue to overthrow it by a sudden appeal to the passions and interests of the hour, as the first step to a radical change.[385] But the great man, whose mature and energetic youth, trained in the school of Washington, had been devoted to the formation and establishment of the Union, knew too well, that, if its golden cord were once broken, no human agency could restore it to life. He knew the value of habit, the respect for an established, however enfeebled authority; and while he felt and insisted on the necessity for a new constitution, and did all in his power to make the country perceive the defects of the old one, he wisely and honestly admitted that the assent of Congress must be gained to any movement which proposed to remedy the evil.